The Housewives Underground
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer for The Atlantic. She has now published her third book. Although it is called The Housewives Underground, her protagonist was not a housewife.
Sylvia Meagher was a professional analyst and researcher for the United Nations for over thirty years. She was briefly married but had no children. There are two supporting characters in the book who were housewives, namely Maggie Field of California and Shirley Martin of Oklahoma. Since neither of the latter contributed the work product that Meagher did, the author decided to make the New Yorker her lead character. I should add, neither Field nor Martin could have provided the polemical drama that Meagher did, since the book has a clear antagonist. This is a point we shall get to later.
Meagher was born in Brooklyn in 1921. Her father worked in the food supply business, selling stuffed derma to local delis. (p. 5) She never graduated from college, but a doctor helped her attain a position with the World Health Organization, part of the newly formed United Nations.
An impactful event in her life happened in 1952. This was when the Senate subcommittee on Internal Security subpoenaed 30 Americans who worked at the UN--on the suspicion that they were or had been communists. In fact, the FBI opened an office on the third floor and a fingerprinting facility in the basement. (p. 7)
Meagher would not allow herself to be fingerprinted or questioned, on the grounds that the UN was an international body. When her niece had to sign a loyalty oath to get her high school diploma, Meagher was angry about it:
She was so incensed. She was very uncompromising about things. She had a very clear idea of what is right, what’s correct, and I don’t know that you could really talk her out of that. (p. 8)
This trait can be a double-edged sword. Since, if taken too far, it can lead to self-righteousness. As far as I can see, Tiffany’s other two supporting characters did not exhibit that trait to Meagher’s degree. But for all three, the weekend of the assassination was a huge event. Especially after Jack Ruby killed Oswald. Field started covering her walls with newspaper clippings. (p. 26) Shirley was home that Friday since she was homeschooling her children.
Meagher wrote a diary entry called “Bitter Thoughts after the 22nd of November.” There was a question in it:
Why were they so anxious to punish the murderer of a president they had called a traitor and taught their children to hate? Something is rotten in Dallas and the smell reaches all the way to Denmark. (p. 32)
II
In introducing the Warren Commission, Tiffany repeats a piece of dubious information she borrows from that inflated mediocrity Robert Caro. Bobby Kennedy did not recommend Allen Dulles for the Warren Commission. (p.34) As HSCA investigator Dan Hardway exposed, this was a piece of flotsam injected into the record in 1965 by Johnson’s entourage after the fact. She also says that Lyndon Johnson had to “cajole” Warren into taking the chairman’s position. (ibid) That is not the right word. The reports were that Johnson so frightened Warren with images of mushroom clouds over Washington that the Chief Justice was weeping when he left the White House. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, p. 440, revised edition)
There is no doubt that this fear impacted Warren’s performance as chair. In the infamous memo composed by staffer Melvin Eisenberg, Warren explained how Johnson had warned him about the specter of atomic war and how he could not refuse the position after that. Warren then added, “The President convinced him that this was an occasion on which actual conditions had to override general principles.” (Memo of January 20th 1964, first staff meeting) And it’s pretty clear that the staff got the message. Because when he interviewed Sylvia Odio in Dallas, Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler told her they had orders from Warren: if they uncovered anything indicating conspiracy, they were to shove it under the rug. (Gaeton Fonzi memo of 1/16/76, for the Church Committee)
So using the word cajole does not really convey what Johnson’s intent was, or its effect on Warren. It’s pretty clear that Warren was intimidated, that he conveyed this to his employees-- and they got the message.
So did the Secret Service and FBI. She writes that the Parkland doctors initially suggested that the throat wound in Kennedy was an entrance wound. (p. 37). Malcolm Perry said this three times during the press conference. (Gary Aguilar, Probe, Vol. 4 No. 3, p. 20) As Jim Gochenauer revealed in the film JFK Revisited, it was Secret Service agent Elmer Moore who was tasked with having Perry alter his story for the Warren Commission. This was needed since Perry’s first day statement would indicate a shot from the front, yet Oswald was behind the president.
She also says the FBI was convinced Oswald was the culprit and there was little more to find. (p. 37) But according to witness Billy Byars, Hoover knew better. Concerning the Oswald story, the Director said: “If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to the country. Our whole political system could be disrupted.” (Tony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 139) Hoover also knew that the CIA had given him a phony story about Oswald being in Mexico City. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 224)
In the growing criticism of the official story, Tiffany does include a pungent quote by author Eric Norden:
Is the hand that reached out from Washington to ensure Oswald had a passport, to trace his travels to Mexico, and perhaps guide him in even more shadowy activities, also the hand that felled John Kennedy? (p. 43)
She also notes early critical work by Harold Feldman in The Nation, although she mistakenly calls him an attorney. (ibid) To her credit, she includes Warren’s self-incriminating quote to a group of reporters that all the information the Commission had might not be released in their lifetimes. (p. 45) This turned out to be largely true, as it was not until over thirty years later that the last of the Commission documents was declassified. And according to ace researcher Malcolm Blunt, even in the mid-nineties there were some Commission documents, composed by the late attorney David Slawson, that were still being held.
III
Shirley Martin was born in Manila in 1924; she then moved to Australia, then to Hawaii. (pp. 52-53) Due to her second husband, at the time of the JFK murder she was living in a hicktown called Hominy, Oklahoma. Which had a population of less than 3,000 in 1960. But since it was closer to Dallas than either Meagher or Field were, Shirley would pack up her kids in her car and drive there. In one year she made 12 visits to the Big D. (p. 57) It was Martin who had direct contact with Ruth Paine and also with the FBI. The latter was partly due to Ruth, since Paine would sometimes call the Bureau after she was visited by Shirley. In fact, Ruth was questioned by the Commission about Martin. Martin was insulting to the G Men, insinuating that they were both amateurish and offensive. (p. 56, p. 85) One of the highlights of the book is when Martin literally calls out Ruth Paine with the following:
Ruth, you thought Lee was just as innocent as I did after the assassination. You thought, just as we all did, that a rightwing group had killed Kennedy, not Lee. (p. 161)
This greatly flustered Ruth, to the point she raised her voice and shook with anger. But Martin was so suspicious of the woman that she considered this to be part of an act.
Martin was one of the very first to talk to Acquilla Clemmons. Who told her there were two men involved in the murder of Tippit. When the police interviewed Clemmons, they told her not to talk anymore. (p. 76)
Maggie Field had a unique ambition for a book on the case. It was to be called The Evidence. And she created something she called panoplies. She would take a declarative statement from the report. Then she would locate compromising or contradicting evidence in the volumes. She would then glue them onto one page, keeping both intact. (p. 127) She actually got a publisher, Random House, interested in the book. But inexplicably, they dropped her contract after paying an advance. The excuse was that it would be too expensive to produce. But she always felt that was just a pretext for the fact it would be a prime exposure of the unethical methods the Commission had used. (p. 274; interview with Field, 1995)
Field was also good at arranging appearances for the critics on the West Coast, e.g., Penn Jones and Mark Lane. The event that she and Ray Marcus put together at Beverly Hills High on December 4, 1964 was memorable. (pp. 106-09). Tiffany describes most of the participants, like Mark Lane, Joe Ball and Herman Selvin. But she leaves out what I think were the two high points of the debate. First, when Lane revealed the format of the proceeding, which he had to agree to, in order for the opposition to show up. Second, the fact that A. L. Wirin was there. He was the chief counsel for the ACLU in Southern California. Wirin started by praising liberals Carey McWilliams and I. F. Stone, who both backed the Commission. He then approved what Earl Warren did in not blaming Russia or Cuba for the assassination as preventing pogroms against the Left. The audience was stunned by this. And Lane made an eloquent and pungent reply to Wirin—comparing the Oswald case to the Dreyfus affair—one strongly appreciated by the crowd of 3,000 plus a broadcast audience of Pacifica Radio.
Throughout the book, to put it mildly, she downplays Lane. Yet Lane was the leading voice in keeping the case alive in the early years. For instance, he appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in 1966 and also on The Mike Douglas Show that same year. He made regular appearances in New York, which Tiffany mentions, and in Europe. He also did many radio broadcasts. I cannot think of anyone in the years 1963-67 who kept the JFK case alive as much as Lane did. (Lane’s initial article was published in The Guardian on December 19, 1963).
Tiffany also treats David Lifton in a rather discounting manner. Many people do so. But if one is concentrating on the early years of the critical community, one should mention the article Lifton co-authored for Ramparts in January of 1967. It was titled The Case for Three Assassins. It was a very long piece with a preface, its own table of contents and was plentifully annotated. Many people, including this reviewer, think it is the best work Lifton did. Tiffany only says about this important piece that Meagher heard Lifton was working on it and shuddered at Lifton running around without inhibition. (p. 148) Well, he did not. Warren Hinckle assigned David Welsh to be the co-writer and article editor, and he got first billing. I mean, fair is fair.
IV
But this is a problem with the book. Tiffany has decided to make Meagher not just the main character but pretty much a heroine of—in my opinion—exalted proportions. For instance, like many, she says that Meagher indexed the Warren Commission. In Volume 15 of the series, one will find a name index. Which is how legal documents are indexed. What Meagher did was add a subject index. Meagher also went wild over Edward Epstein’s book Inquest and over Epstein himself. (p. 135, p. 151) Others thought Epstein’s book was something of a palliative: it tried to somehow excuse what the Commission did. As quoted by Joseph McBride, Epstein wrote the following:
If the Commission had made it clear that very substantial evidence indicated the presence of a second assassin, it would have opened a Pandora’s box of doubts and suspicions. In establishing its version of the truth, the Warren Commission acted to reassure the nation and protect the national interest. (Political Truth, pp. 192-93; Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles, pp. 158-59
To reassure the nation and protect the national interest? What national interest, and what was the purpose of the reassuring? McBride followed that reverberating phrase with the observation that in 1966, Epstein knew “full well that the assassination was covered up.” Yet, he seemed to be at work attempting “to justify the reason for the cover-up.” In fact, Epstein left out key pieces of information from his book. For instance, that the main writers of the report were Norman Redlich and Alfred Goldberg. Goldberg was the only non-lawyer on the staff, and he had previously worked for the CIA and was brought onto the commission by Allen Dulles. Epstein noted these in his diary but not in his book. (McBride, p. 155).
And it was not until 2015 that Epstein revealed the totality of his interview with Arlen Specter. The Philadelphia lawyer had noted that, for only three bullets to have been fired, one of them would have had to have been the Magic Bullet. So Specter set up a screening of the Zapruder film. He then told the Commission, we either go with the Single Bullet Theory, or we start looking for a second assassin. This is not in Inquest. (Assume Nothing, by Edward Epstein, pp. 69-70)
Edward Epstein ended up flipping sides. And he did it quite early. He appears on the record album Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report. In other words, he cooperated with two men that Meagher despised, Larry Schiller and Richard Warren Lewis. And that was just the beginning. At a debate in Boston in late 1966, Epstein pretty much told Vince Salandria that he was turning. (John Kelin, Praise from a Future Generation, e-book, p. 335) But Sylvia was still working with Epstein at this time; they cooperated on a couple of articles for Esquire. Which, in this reviewer’s opinion, turned out to be pretty nondescript. (p. 174) Later, Epstein ended consulting with former CIA Counter-intelligence chief James Angleton for his book Legend, which said Oswald did it for Cuba. In Ray Marcus’ notes on his correspondence with Meagher, he writes that she concluded later that Epstein had turned to the other side.
I should add that Tiffany writes that Schiller did not work for the FBI. Which is true in a formal sense. (p. 227) But there are 47 pages of a Bureau informant record by Schiller on the JFK case which this reviewer has seen.
In a puzzler for a book on the early critics, I could not find a reference to Vince Salandria’s watershed article in The Legal Intelligencer from November of 1964. Which is odd. Because this article was praised by people like Josiah Thompson as being the first technical dismantling of the Single Bullet Theory, and it was published in a law journal. In my view, in addition to Lane, the book is rather dismissive of Salandria.
She also understates the significance of John Connally’s public disagreement with the Single Bullet Theory. Connally said he had only that disagreement with the Commission’s overall findings. But it’s not what he really thought, or could have thought--since the Magic Bullet was the fulcrum of the Commission verdict. Years later, with reporter Doug Thompson, he was more honest. During a political fundraiser, Thompson asked him if he really believed the Warren Commission. Connally was unequivocal: “Absolutely not. I do not, for one second, believe the conclusions of the Warren Commission.” Thompson then asked him why he did not speak out. The reply was one common to those in a position of power and influence--a misguided patriotism: “Because I love this country and we needed closure at the time. I will never speak out publicly about what I believe.” (McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 418)
V
Tiffany has given several interviews about her book to venues like Publishers Weekly. There she said Meagher was not tempted by wild conspiracy theories. Apparently she never read Cyril Wecht’s book The JFK Assassination Dissected. Wecht was friendly with the New Yorker; he talked to her on the phone, and they shared a correspondence. He even visited her at her apartment. Wecht writes that she told him that she would not put it past the government to have altered the autopsy X-rays and photos to suit their Oswald did it alone scenario. (Wecht and Dawna Kaufmann, p. 152) What is so remarkable about this statement is that she appears to have made it in the sixties! Which was before anyone had seen those exhibits, and years before Wecht saw them.
In addition, Chapter 21 of her book, Accessories After the Fact, is entitled, rather sneeringly, “No Conspiracy?” There she spends almost forty pages outlining evidence of a conspiratorial plot, clearly mapped out before the fact. In those pages she includes the Two Oswald thesis. And she frowns on the Commission’s refusal to consider certain instances of the 2nd Oswald as possibly being a deliberate impersonation. (Meagher, p. 360) She scores the double standard the Commission held: namely that with the people they wanted to believe, they dismissed the problems in their testimony. With ones they were predisposed against, it did not matter how credible they were or how much support they had. She adds that certain commissioners entertained the possibility of Larry Crafard, an associate of Jack Ruby, as the impersonator. (Meagher, p. 361)
Meagher’s chapter concluded with a subhead titled, “The Proof of the Plot”. There, she describes the Sylvia Odio incident in detail. And to return to Wecht, he wrote that Sylvia thought a cabal of Cuban exiles had killed JFK. (p. 151) Startlingly, almost all of this is ignored by the author.
Maybe because one of the witnesses Meagher used in that chapter was a focus of Jim Garrison, namely attorney Dean Andrews. But Garrison went further with Andrews than Meagher did. And I think this is a good place to point out the three subtexts in the book. In addition to the exaltation of Meagher, there is a clear attempt to smear Garrison and a more mild attempt to belittle John Kennedy. For instance, she writes that Meagher thought Clay Shaw was indicted because of his homosexuality. (p. 313). In light of the declassified record, Meagher was wrong. Garrison had numerous witnesses who said that Shaw was Clay Bertrand, the man who called Andrews to go to Dallas and defend Oswald. (See William Davy’s Let Justice be Done, pp. 190-94; Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, pp. 121-27; James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 387-88) But further, in Harold Weisberg’s unpublished manuscript, Mailer’s Tale, he writes that Andrews told him that Shaw was Bertrand. But he requested that Harold not tell anyone until he had passed; a pledge which Weisberg honored. (See chapter 5, p. 11)
Tiffany also writes that Shaw was only with the CIA as a paid informant from 1948-56. (p. 311) The declassified record says he was a domestic businessman’s informant, a paid contract agent, had a covert security clearance, and he was part of the infamous and illicit CIA front, Permindex, in Rome. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, pp. 382-86; also click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/clay-shaw-in-italy-part-1)
One of the most surprising things the author does in this regard is she fails to mention the appearance of Dr. Pierre Finck at the Shaw trial. Yet, today, most observers think that just might be the most important evidence that the proceeding produced. It was devastating to the official story. It showed that Kennedy’s autopsy had been curtailed and then reshaped by the military brass who attended the proceeding. It was so powerful that it shook the halls of Washington. To the point that the Justice Department sent fellow pathologist Thornton Boswell to New Orleans to discredit Finck! At the last minute, the DOJ decided against this tactic. (Ibid, pp. 299-306)
To give the reader an idea of what the book is like, Tiffany uses James Phelan and Tom Bethell as sources to attack Garrison. The declassified record has shown that Phelan was a government informant- -a point which he lied about for a long time. Also, author Joe Billes has convincingly countered Phelan’s story about Garrison using illicit tactics to somehow hypnotize Perry Russo to tell a story he did not originally reveal. (In History’s Shadow, pp. 43-45)
As per Bethell, she writes that he quit Garrison’s office at the time of the Martin Luther King murder. This contrasts with information that Louis Ivon, Garrison’s chief investigator, gave me. (Click here https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/tom-bethell-a-study-in-duplicity-1198) She also notes that Bethell wrote in his diary that Garrison had no information that David Ferrie knew Lee Oswald. (p. 270) Again, this is not supported by the declassified record. Garrison had members of Ferrie’s Civil Air Patrol unit who put the two together back in the fifties. (Davy, note 15, p. 280) Guy Banister operative Jack Martin—a Garrison informant-- said that he had been introduced to Oswald by Ferrie in Banister’s office. (DiEugenio, p. 112) Literally dozens of people saw Ferrie with Oswald during the Clinton-Jackson incident. (ibid, pp. 88-93) Richard Case Nagell, who Garrison interviewed and wanted to testify at the Shaw trial, said Oswald was associated with Ferrie. (ibid, p. 97) Thomas Lewis Clark told Garrison that Ferrie admitted to him that he had taught Oswald. (Mellen, p. 41)
The dead giveaway about the pair is that Ferrie had a panic attack at the time of the assassination and tried to conceal their relationship. He went to two sources to see if they recalled Oswald using his library card, and he called a former CAP cadet to locate any picture depicting him with Lee. He then perjured himself to the FBI about their relationship. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 175-77; CD 75 pp. 285-97)
Plain and simple, Bethell was a liar.
VI
In her fulsome praise of Meagher, Tiffany says that her work in Accessories After the Fact placed her head and shoulders above anyone in the critical community. (p. 281) One can state that hers was the best of the first-generation attacks on the Warren Report. (Today it has been surpassed by Gerald McKnight’s Breach of Trust.) But to say it is head and shoulders above, say, Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas? Thompson had a different approach. He was both a field investigator and quite interested in the photographic record. Meagher rated a zero in the first category, and near zero in the second. She was a textual analyst. Thompson’s book had more than a few stunning revelations, which were crucial. Namely, that CE 399 was switched. (Thompson, p. 175) That it was not possible to dent CE 543, one of the shells, the way it was dented. (Ibid, p. 144) That the magic bullet was found on Ronnie Fuller’s stretcher, not John Connally’s. (Ibid pgs. 155-64) And that the Commission lied about the trajectory of the bullet through Kennedy’s skull. (ibid, p. 111) I could go on, but I think that is enough to make the point. Thompson demonstrates all these convincingly with not just text, but pictures and illustrations, lacking in Meagher’s book. So to say that Accessories After the Fact is head and shoulders above all others of the time that is, in my view, hyperbole.
Tiffany describes Roger Feinman as the man who gave an oration at Meagher’s funeral service. She mentions Feinman’s friend and another Sylvia follower in passing, Jerry Policoff. I knew Jerry for many years before his passing. He told me something about Meagher and Garrison that is relevant. He said, “Jim, she was irrational when it came to Garrison. She actually contributed money to Shaw’s defense.” In other words, it was not enough that Shaw was getting help from the FBI and CIA; Meagher was giving him money also.
To read her letters to Clay Shaw is a bit embarrassing. She compares his innocence to that of Oswald. (Letter of 7/10/68). To my knowledge, Meagher never visited New Orleans, interviewed Garrison or looked at the evidence in his files—even after the case was over. I mean Shaw must have been grinning ear to ear at her combination of ignorance and arrogance.
This relates to another point that Tiffany glances over: the choice by publisher Prentice Hall of Meagher to critique a prior draft of Garrison’s last book. As Policoff told me, Meagher should have never accepted that assignment; she was simply too biased.
I have read some of her notes and Garrison’s reply. She contested his thesis that the motorcade route was changed. Which, as Vince Palamara has proven, it was. (Survivor’s Guilt, p. 105) But what surprised me was who she used to argue the point: Secret Service agent Winston Lawson. Lawson and colleague Forrest Sorrels arranged the route and the car order in the fatal motorcade. As the HSCA proved, it was not necessary to go through Dealey Plaza to get to the Trade Mart. Therefore, the infamous dogleg –during which the assassination occurred--should not have happened. (ibid, p. 109) And Winston Lawson arranged the cars so that Dr. Burkley would be far away from his patient, the president, that Kennedy would be separated from the nuclear football, and that the flatbed for the photographers would not be in front of JFK, therefore drastically limiting camera coverage of the assassination. Instead, Lawson and Sorrels were in the car in front of Kennedy. Can one imagine using Lawson as a source on the subject? (Bill Simpich presentation at Gary Aguilar’s seminar July 11, 2026)
She was also wrong in her appearance before the HSCA critics’ conference. There, she argued that the Clinton/Jackson witnesses who saw Shaw and Ferrie with Oswald did not surface until six years after the fact. (p. 356) These witnesses told their story in 1965 to Ned Touchstone, who published the right-wing Councilor. (Mellen, pp. 214-15) But, before that, Reeves Morgan--who Oswald visited at his home-- phoned the FBI in 1963, and the Bureau sent an agent to Jackson State Hospital to abscond with an employment application Oswald left there. (Mellen, pp. 233-34) Again, these indicate Meagher’s shortcomings as a field investigator.
Tiffany also states that Meagher did not vote for JFK in 1960 and was not all that impressed by him. (See pp. 158, 167, 382, 396). Can one imagine sitting out that election with a choice between Nixon and Kennedy? Let us just recall what happened in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after Kennedy was killed. About five million people eventually perished in a war from which Kennedy was withdrawing. And as William Shawcross demonstrates in his book Sideshow, it was Nixon and Henry Kissinger who caused the Cambodian holocaust. I will not even review Indonesia, except to say that Indonesia expert Bradley Simpson maintains that the bloody massacres of 1965 would not have happened if Kennedy had lived.
The book ends with Meagher’s death, symbolic as a kind of requiem for the critical movement. (p. 397) Tiffany does not mention that the book Meagher panned was then purchased by Oliver Stone. It was made into the film JFK, which created both a hit film and a year-long media/worldwide sensation. It recreated and revived the critical community way beyond what it had been previously. Thousands of people now joined in at annual conferences in Dallas, Washington, and Pittsburgh—home of Cyril Wecht. Thus exploding way beyond the 13 persons crammed into Meagher’s apartment in the fall of 1965. That book and film also caused the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, which operated from 1994-98 and declassified 2 million pages of previously sealed records. These took the JFK case to a whole different level. And it has not stopped, as the Luna hearings have shown. There is no mention of any of this in the book. This is what happens when one exalts a heroine.
And this is why I would recommend John Kelin’s book Praise from a Future Generation over The Housewives Underground. He didn’t play favorites.
